fwiw I don't think you've failed. your initial point seemed reasonable to me, but I can see how it may have appeared controversial. the exposition clarifies the argument. navigating 'the discourse' these days demands that we're constantly zooming in and out, slowing down, speeding up and shifting perspective – precisely because everything is already everywhere all the time. i would possibly argue that 'genre' has never been the domain of the artist – only the critic. and perhaps the entrepreneur. but it seems to me that the artist's concern has always been to just do stuff.
good question! i don't think there's any real, objective answer but personally i think Onkyo is a pretty good candidate. Hyperpop seems very much like a phenomenon of the "after" imo, along with like, Rage, Brostep, Funk bruxaria, other maximalist takes on popular musics
But the article here references Hardcore as its own idiom, it seems a bit strange to me that Hardcore would be its own thing but all these others are a take on something else. And also that Onkyo would be its own thing and not a take on Reductionism. I think if we're going to say that all the children in the decades and centuries and millennia to come who make music will never be able to have their own thing, that they'll only have the ability to add to one of our things, then it should be easier to tell what makes a thing a thing, and what the last one was.
look, the number of genres to emerge in the last 200 years that aren't in some sense a "take on something else" is probably in the single digits. the distinction is not that Hardcore is an idiom and, say, Rage isn't, but rather that Hardcore expanded the field of idiomatic possibility by pushing beyond the established limits of how aggressive and chaotic a popular musical form could be, and Rage responds to a situation where those limits no longer really exist. the importance of Onkyo, which i agree is more debatable, is that it applied many of Reductionism's principles to an entirely improvisatory context – that is, it established that music tending towards silence did not require any sort of score or predefined compositional act to legitimize itself. this is a relatively small idiomatic expansion, to be sure, but that's what you would expect so late in the game.
more to the point, i'm not saying no one will be able to have "their own thing" again – quite the opposite, i'm saying *everyone* can have their own thing now, if they want it, and this is precisely why i think genre has never been less relevant to making or thinking about music. i've noticed it's usually right around when everyone agrees on a name for it that a tendency in post-internet music starts to lose its sense of vitality. i don't think that's a coincidence.
I think there's this general sense that the idea of "no new genres" feels true to people, that's real. And the issue you bring up at the end there about the post-internet culture activates a vampiric collective consciousness that pursues and drains any sign of vitality without care or concern for the humanity it springs from as soon as a name is applied to it, that's also real. But I think they both trace back to how we are still making sense of social media's radical introduction of the many-to-many communication style which has fundamentally changed the nature of discussion between people. A lot of people regularly shout into a void that sometimes shouts back in the dozens, and sometimes tenfold that, all at everyone, and this is a recent development. I believe this is a printing press level transformational event and it's making everything *weird* right now, but I don't think we're going to be like this forever. It would be very sad if we were!
I'm sorry to hijack your argument and apply my own terms, but I can't help but see your description of the musical landscape like it's the virtual, in a Bergsonism sense of the word. The Avant-garde activities acted as probes into the virtual space of what music could be and have illuminated the possibilities without actualizing them. After decades of effort, the doubts about whether we could do something were all replaced with questions about whether we should. There is no ground left to be broken, but that doesn't mean there isn't still room for ingenuity and creativity in how one navigates this landscape.
And while I do think I have some fun disagreements with that approach to thinking about things, the part that I think is more interesting is whether a genre would need to have that sense of opening up the possibility of the terrain to feel new to people. Because music isn't Narnia. It's not a place that we get to go to that's separate from us. It's a terrain that is brought into this world from human action. And our human actions are *very limited* right now. It is very funny to talk about the limitless possibilities of music these days when it is such a small percentage of lives that could allow for existing as a drummer. It has never been easier and more accessible to make music, but so many are turning to AI prompting because it allows people to make something that sounds expensive.
And so I think in that environment, it's still possible for music to come along that shows people they can create something amazing in their own lives that did not seem possible beforehand, even if it was clearly already shown to be possible for more resourced lives by the true innovators. There will be challenges due to the aforementioned vampires, and maybe we'll have to truly become different for us to be able to do it again, but I don't think it's lost forever.
Maybe dubstep lol, I hate saying it but like...it kind of had a bit of a technical requirement to make its annoying structure that only because easily accessible with computers? I also think it would be the perfect genre to be used to put a bullet in the back of the head of the term genre.
This is a well written piece but I think that there is a fairly clear issue with it which is that it takes a teleological approach rooted in the avant garde's being conceived of as an end point. You can see that by your repeat reference to the Jazz History 101 progression of New Orleans > Swing > Bebop > Free Jazz. (I am an avantgarde jazz fan so I know this one well - nice reference to a quirky mid period EFJ record.)
In fact, genres are not like that, or not necessarily. Genres evolve in a non-directional way. Cha cha cha was not a progression from mambo, it was just different. House music is not a progression from techno.
What should be happening is that people should have become tired of e.g. techno, and have moved on to something else. The mystery is why they aren't doing that. And why it is still the same genres as when I was a child, just with some more mixing between genres or changes to aesthetics. It isn't clear to me why even when a genre really does change completely, like modern black metal (which is often a sort of shoe gaze) or drum and bass (which is often American style dubstep), the older genre names are retained.
I think that the key rests in various places but can't just be musical as this is something occuring across the arts and fashion.
fwiw I don't think you've failed. your initial point seemed reasonable to me, but I can see how it may have appeared controversial. the exposition clarifies the argument. navigating 'the discourse' these days demands that we're constantly zooming in and out, slowing down, speeding up and shifting perspective – precisely because everything is already everywhere all the time. i would possibly argue that 'genre' has never been the domain of the artist – only the critic. and perhaps the entrepreneur. but it seems to me that the artist's concern has always been to just do stuff.
So what would you say the last idiom is? What was the last one we needed to get all the pieces in place to finish the map? Was it hyperpop?
good question! i don't think there's any real, objective answer but personally i think Onkyo is a pretty good candidate. Hyperpop seems very much like a phenomenon of the "after" imo, along with like, Rage, Brostep, Funk bruxaria, other maximalist takes on popular musics
But the article here references Hardcore as its own idiom, it seems a bit strange to me that Hardcore would be its own thing but all these others are a take on something else. And also that Onkyo would be its own thing and not a take on Reductionism. I think if we're going to say that all the children in the decades and centuries and millennia to come who make music will never be able to have their own thing, that they'll only have the ability to add to one of our things, then it should be easier to tell what makes a thing a thing, and what the last one was.
look, the number of genres to emerge in the last 200 years that aren't in some sense a "take on something else" is probably in the single digits. the distinction is not that Hardcore is an idiom and, say, Rage isn't, but rather that Hardcore expanded the field of idiomatic possibility by pushing beyond the established limits of how aggressive and chaotic a popular musical form could be, and Rage responds to a situation where those limits no longer really exist. the importance of Onkyo, which i agree is more debatable, is that it applied many of Reductionism's principles to an entirely improvisatory context – that is, it established that music tending towards silence did not require any sort of score or predefined compositional act to legitimize itself. this is a relatively small idiomatic expansion, to be sure, but that's what you would expect so late in the game.
more to the point, i'm not saying no one will be able to have "their own thing" again – quite the opposite, i'm saying *everyone* can have their own thing now, if they want it, and this is precisely why i think genre has never been less relevant to making or thinking about music. i've noticed it's usually right around when everyone agrees on a name for it that a tendency in post-internet music starts to lose its sense of vitality. i don't think that's a coincidence.
I think there's this general sense that the idea of "no new genres" feels true to people, that's real. And the issue you bring up at the end there about the post-internet culture activates a vampiric collective consciousness that pursues and drains any sign of vitality without care or concern for the humanity it springs from as soon as a name is applied to it, that's also real. But I think they both trace back to how we are still making sense of social media's radical introduction of the many-to-many communication style which has fundamentally changed the nature of discussion between people. A lot of people regularly shout into a void that sometimes shouts back in the dozens, and sometimes tenfold that, all at everyone, and this is a recent development. I believe this is a printing press level transformational event and it's making everything *weird* right now, but I don't think we're going to be like this forever. It would be very sad if we were!
I'm sorry to hijack your argument and apply my own terms, but I can't help but see your description of the musical landscape like it's the virtual, in a Bergsonism sense of the word. The Avant-garde activities acted as probes into the virtual space of what music could be and have illuminated the possibilities without actualizing them. After decades of effort, the doubts about whether we could do something were all replaced with questions about whether we should. There is no ground left to be broken, but that doesn't mean there isn't still room for ingenuity and creativity in how one navigates this landscape.
And while I do think I have some fun disagreements with that approach to thinking about things, the part that I think is more interesting is whether a genre would need to have that sense of opening up the possibility of the terrain to feel new to people. Because music isn't Narnia. It's not a place that we get to go to that's separate from us. It's a terrain that is brought into this world from human action. And our human actions are *very limited* right now. It is very funny to talk about the limitless possibilities of music these days when it is such a small percentage of lives that could allow for existing as a drummer. It has never been easier and more accessible to make music, but so many are turning to AI prompting because it allows people to make something that sounds expensive.
And so I think in that environment, it's still possible for music to come along that shows people they can create something amazing in their own lives that did not seem possible beforehand, even if it was clearly already shown to be possible for more resourced lives by the true innovators. There will be challenges due to the aforementioned vampires, and maybe we'll have to truly become different for us to be able to do it again, but I don't think it's lost forever.
Maybe dubstep lol, I hate saying it but like...it kind of had a bit of a technical requirement to make its annoying structure that only because easily accessible with computers? I also think it would be the perfect genre to be used to put a bullet in the back of the head of the term genre.
This is a well written piece but I think that there is a fairly clear issue with it which is that it takes a teleological approach rooted in the avant garde's being conceived of as an end point. You can see that by your repeat reference to the Jazz History 101 progression of New Orleans > Swing > Bebop > Free Jazz. (I am an avantgarde jazz fan so I know this one well - nice reference to a quirky mid period EFJ record.)
In fact, genres are not like that, or not necessarily. Genres evolve in a non-directional way. Cha cha cha was not a progression from mambo, it was just different. House music is not a progression from techno.
What should be happening is that people should have become tired of e.g. techno, and have moved on to something else. The mystery is why they aren't doing that. And why it is still the same genres as when I was a child, just with some more mixing between genres or changes to aesthetics. It isn't clear to me why even when a genre really does change completely, like modern black metal (which is often a sort of shoe gaze) or drum and bass (which is often American style dubstep), the older genre names are retained.
I think that the key rests in various places but can't just be musical as this is something occuring across the arts and fashion.